The push to funnel increasingly advanced weapons to Ukraine hasn’t interfered with the US’s long-standing policy of arming Taiwan against threats from China, a top State Department official said on Friday.
(Bloomberg) — The push to funnel increasingly advanced weapons to Ukraine hasn’t interfered with the US’s long-standing policy of arming Taiwan against threats from China, a top State Department official said on Friday.
“We are singularly focused on Taiwan” even as weapons sent to Ukraine and Eastern Europe have surged, Jessica Lewis, the assistant secretary of state for political and military affairs, told reporters Friday.
Some Republican members of Congress have said the Biden administration should be moving faster to ship weapons to the island democracy that China claims as its own. Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who chairs the new select committee on China and recently returned from a trip to Taiwan, said he came back “even more convinced that the time to arm Taiwan to the teeth was yesterday.”
But Lewis said getting weapons shipped to Taiwan quickly once the State Department and Congress have approved the foreign military sales depends on a US defense industry that has been hit by Covid-19 staffing issues and supply-chain snags.
“What we really have right now is a challenge for our defense industrial base across the board — it’s not Taiwan-specific,” she said. “We’re seeing this tectonic change, this increase in demand, combined with real supply-chain and human resource challenges brought on by COVID and other issues.”
The US is now encouraging defense contractors to focus on how to produce more of the weapons needed, not just for Taiwan but for countries in Europe that have increased their defense budgets and weapons purchases as result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Lewis said.
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